One Box, One Army

 Andrew from the Chicago Dice blog runs a feature called "1 Box, 1 Army", which is a guide for new players on how to build a viable Bolt Action army, legal for Third Edition, using just one platoon box of plastic figures from Warlord Games (or occasionally, Wargames Atlantic).

I submitted an army list for a German Grenadiers army, and you can check it out at this link.  What you get is a 500-point, 30-man platoon that's actually pretty competitive for its point level, and all from a $60 box.

Since the release of the Armies of Germany supplement, the list has become a little outdated.  The first change is that the commanding officer and his orderlies must now pay for weapon upgrade options.  That's a fairly easy change - either equip all three soldiers with rifles, or give all of the SMGs to that little squad.  You could drop an orderly, but it's no longer possible for a Heer army to have more than one assault rifle in that unit.  The best you could get would be the officer with an assault rifle, and one orderly with an SMG (this would save 3 points over the original cost for the unit)

The change that really hurts, however, is that Heer Grenadier squads may now only have one LMG.  In order to have two in a squad, the unit must be either Heer Veteran Grenadiers, or Panzergrenadiers.  This would increase the cost of a 10-man squad by 30 or 40 points, respectively.  As crazy as it sounds (and as much as it hurts to do), I'd recommend keeping the squads at 10 men, dropping the second LMG and replacing it with a Panzerfaust - at least, if you intend to stay at the 500-point level.  It's a case of "boys before toys", and the goal of the exercise is to make use of as much of the box as possible.  So we want to have as many soldiers as we can.

The assault squad remains the same - as they are Veterans already, they are able to make use of the weapon options for which they are equipped, at no change to the points cost.

So, there you have it.  You are still building an army of 29 or 30 soldiers, using as much of the box as possible.  All you're losing is just one orderly, or a couple of machine guns.  That part is the hard choice, since two LMGs per squad was pivotal to late-war Grenadier doctrine, but I guess those troops would have been considered Veterans for the purposes of the game.  You do gain another pair of Panzerfausts, which gives some anti-armor firepower, but at a 500-point game the only vehicles you're likely to see are soft-skinned anyway (and seldom worth investing so many of your limited points).

Here is my recommendation for the new list, legal for use with Armies of Germany:

Rifle Platoon
Platoon Commander (Rifle) – Vet – 39 +2 Additional Men (Rifles) – Vet – 26	65pts
Heer Grenadier Squad – Reg – 10 men – 100 NCO SMG – 4 x1 SMG – 4 x1 LMG – 15 1x Panzerfaust - 15	138pts
Heer Grenadier Squad – Reg – 10 men – 100 NCO SMG – 4 x1 LMG – 30 1x Panzerfaust - 15	134pts
Heer Veteran Grenadier Squad – Vet – 7 men – 91 x7 Assault Rifles – 42 x2 Panzerfausts – 30	163pts
Total – 4 Order Dice	500pts